How does antitrust enforcement against patent-based monopolies affect innovation? I address this question by … ordered to license all its copier-technology patents in the US and abroad. I show that this promoted innovation by other firms … available for licensing. This positive effect is driven by increased innovation by Japanese competitors. They started developing …

We investigate how international patent activity enables firms from emerging economies to thrive in the global … marketplace. We match Chinese customs data to US patent records, and leverage the quasi-random assignment of USPTO patent … examiners to identify the causal effect of a US patent grant on the subsequent export performance of Chinese firms. Successful …

This paper provides a first comprehensive quantitative analysis of optimal patent policy in the global economy. We … application delivers three main results. First, the potential gains from international cooperation over patent policies are large …

type of independent patent claims, we show an increase in the annual share of process claims of about 25 percentage points … (from below 10% in 1920). This rise in process intensity is not limited to a few patent classes but can be observed across a … shorter than product claims; but this gap has narrowed since the 1970s. These patterns suggest that the patent breadth and …

To understand why some patents get licensed and others do not we estimate a portfolio of firm- and patent …-level determinants for why a particular licensor's patent was licensed over all technologically similar patents held by other licensors …-in using topic modeling techniques. This provides a more sophisticated way of controlling for patent characteristics and …

positively correlated with technological quality as defined by the patent offices. This premise is taken for granted in classical … defined by the patent offices - on private patent value. To do so, the theoretical links between private values of patents …, technological invention quality, incentives to oppose patents before the European Patent Office (EPO), and observable patent …

Bessen and Meurer (2008) theorize that a breakdown in notice of patent boundaries caused the patent litigation surge of … uncertain scope. In this paper I seek evidence that software patent scope is more uncertain by extending the empirical … rate on all other patent issues. These results are cause for optimism because, in general, the application of existing …

We analyze optimal patent design when innovators can rely on secrecy to protect their innovations. Secrecy has no fixed … of the rights conferred to such second inventors, showing that if the patent life is set optimally, second inventors … should be allowed to patent and to exclude first inventors who have relied on secrecy. We then identify conditions under …